Nature Has An Order
by kreite
Summary: The encroaching kaiju menace awakens an ancient super predator. The events and lore of Pacific Rim are here meshed with those of Godzilla (2014).
1. Chapter 1

**Prologue**

We all thought alien life would come from the stars; when I was a child, living with my dads out in the greener parts of Connecticut I would sometimes take advantage of the minimal light pollution and look out into the night sky, wondering if someone else somewhere else was doing the same thing.

Turns out I was looking in the wrong direction.

I want to say that we could have been prepared; professing one's guilt at a mistake always seems preferable to admitting that you were powerless to prevent the deaths of nearly twelve million people. But in the end the fact of the matter must be swallowed: no one could have guessed that humankind was being watched, keenly and malevolently by intelligences infinitely greater than its own. No one could have predicted that as we busied ourselves with the comforts and banalities of everyday life, with a few turf wars, environmental disasters and celebrity scandals to tide us over, that our lives were being studied, scrutinised, perhaps with no more thought afforded than what a scientist might grant the transient creatures that fumble and multiply in a drop of water.

For what many of us would likely designate as a long time we, like the aforementioned microbes, endured and festered and multiplied and, in rare cases, improved within the infinite complacency of our empire. Only the mad or the sad ever entertained providence to the thought that the darkness surrounding our serene little globe would be a source of great danger or that the bottom of the ocean would be the vessel for the maw that would open from within the deepest darkest depths to swallow us whole.

From behind a fissure known as the Mariana trench, the machinations of a distant, gestalt intellect, with fingers that rend and weave the fabric of space/time itself, regarded our world coolly, unsympathetically with envious eyes, while slowly but surely, drawing their plans against us.

The great disillusionment, otherwise known as K-day, came in the summer of 2013, on August 10th.

The first attack hit San Francisco: heralded by the rumbling voice of an earthquake measuring 7.1 on the Richter scale with an epicentre pinpointed towards the middle of the San Francisco bay. A great, grey dorsal fin grew from the churning waves beneath the golden gate bridge before motorists and pedestrians alike were greeted with the sight of quartet of cloud-sized claws digging into the superstructure, crushing and sending hundreds tumbling to their deaths.

The monster, later nicknamed "Trespasser," went on to decimate the entire city in what was only the beginning of a thirty-five mile rampage that included the destruction of the cities of Sacramento and Oakland over the next six days.

When a vast but ultimately futile gambit of British and American guns, tanks and bombs refused to even slow the creature the higher ups decided enough was enough and on August 15th, five days and tens of thousands of deaths later (not counting military casualties) the San Francisco exclusion zone was created by the screaming light of a trio of nuclear bombs and the vast slick of toxic blood that leaked into the bay for weeks afterward.

At first all humanity could do was reel back in shock, but as with all major disasters, in the end, we memorialized the attack, mourned the statistics, tsk'd at the survivor's cries and kept going.

There were some however, who were hesitant to believe that the danger had truly passed.

"No great challenge, in the history of man, has emblazoned itself in our memory bereft of rivals"

Sure enough, Six months later, the second monster, "Hundun," struck Manila after making land in the Philippines. "Kaiceph" hit Cabo San Lucas, and then "Scissure" laid waste to Sydney. By the time the clip of the opera house's destruction had gone viral the majority of the world understood: this was not going to stop anytime soon.

After almost a year of governments and extremists stonewalling efforts, insisting that WMDs would be enough to deal with the kaiju menace, they grew sense and the jaeger program was born on November 9th 2014.

Japan was unsurprisingly the most enthusiastic, looking to outstrip the rest of the world in much the same way 1960's America fought so hard to be the first nation to put a man on the moon.

They adulated their accomplishment and named their first Jaegar: Jet Jaguar.

The first battle, the first victory, went down in history; the entire world cheered for the pilots that had lost their lives to Jet Jaguar's exposed core and to the orphaned survivor later pulled from the wreckage of Tokyo.

In the wake of this triumph many of the other countries began to pick up the slack and soon enough a slew of new jaegers edified their places in humanity's arsenal.

We started winning. Jaegers were halting the Kaiju menace across the globe, but jaegers are only as good as their pilots, so jaeger pilots turned into rock stars.

Danger turned into propaganda…

Monsters into memorabilia, ruined cities into children's playsets…

We got really good at it though: winning…

Then, everything changed.


	2. Chapter 2

Something was wrong.

Joe glared down at the Geiger counter again.

A quintet of zeroes…

Either the readings were all wrong or the frame of his suspicions had finally been confirmed…

His brow furrowed for the umpteenth time as he scanned over his research on Chernobyl…

"I knew it…"

"Whoa-whoa hey! What are you doing!"

There was only stunned silence for a moment as he deeply inhaled the crisp air, wonderfully refreshing after being forced to suck down the smell of stagnant plastic. Across from him he could feel his son's incredulous scrutiny through the foggy eye lenses of his own gas mask, which he too hesitantly removed after a terse.

"The radiation out here should be lethal but there's nothing…"

He received the same look his son had given him the previous night: when he'd tried again to explain himself: why he had to stay, why his "crusade" was too important to abandon, even for his son's family.

"Don't you get it, Ford? I was right!" all his triumph seemed to do was vex the boy.

"Dad…"

"I can finally put an end to this, blow the whole debacle wide open!" his eyes were looking beyond the skyline now. His breathing was enthused with anticipation.

"Dad."

"I told you I wasn't crazy, this is it, this is the proof I need, proof that they're lying," he stifled an excitable giggle "when I find out what they're really hiding in there…"

"Dad!"

Ford's outburst startled him and sent a flock of birds bursting out of a mossy rain gutter; his frustration however was quickly replaced with sheepishness.

"…I'm sorry, I…"

"No-no, it's fine, go ahead…"

Ford's lips thinned and he seemed to wrestle with himself for a moment.

"Look I've been meaning to ask, okay… assuming you're right, about everything, what do you think's gonna' happen after you "blow this thing wide open"?"

He didn't have an answer at first; his face grew grim as he assembled the words, which were spoken low and hard, as if recited to an audience.

"People will wake up, the government will be forced to admit to their mistake, and their secrets…" here he faltered for a moment "and the people who died that day will see justice done"

He could tell Ford was only a word away from rolling his eyes but there was some recognition there; he savoured it behind a wall of stern decorum.

The trip was mercifully quiet after that; neither of the two men voiced anything beyond a gesture. Joe silently remarked to himself just how out of touch with his son he was after all this time. Perhaps he'd be able do better by him once this was finally over; after all, it wouldn't be much longer now.

Their old house was mostly intact but decades of neglect had rendered it nothing more than another bulging snag in the all-encompassing greenery that had long ago reclaimed the suburbs of Janjira.

He tried to ignore the welling in his gut at the glimpses he caught of his old life: of smiling faces that peered out at him through the copious grime. There were instants he'd find himself veering about and checking the corners of a room for the source of voices he hadn't heard outside his dreams in over a decade.

He navigated all too well to his old office and could only sigh when he found all his old discs themselves undamaged, barring substantial external wear from the elements. He arranged them in a clichéd bag next to a small bottle of caffeine tablets and an elderly blue file holder.

Ford eventually joined him with a pensive, far-off expression and a plastic toy-solder fiddling between his fingers; Joe recognised it as the same one his nine-year-old self had begged him to purchase a week before they'd left for Japan.

"You gonna keep that?" he tried to emphasize the smile in his eyes but Ford never looked at him.

"Sam'll like it" he replied simply.

Once they were outside the climbing whirr of helicopter blades caught their attention and before they knew it they were staring down at the old power plant, fenced and evidently repurposed for something much more expensive: the old towers were gone and a sky scraping figure stood statuesque beside the rustic gates.

"What the hell do they need a Jaeger for?" it was phrased more like a question than a statement but Joe knew that Ford was suitably invested now.

"That's what we're gonna find out"

That was as far as they managed however before the rumbling of an armoured truck harbingered their arrest.

When the blindfold was finally removed Joe found himself sat in what may well once have been an old janitor's closet. There were weary wooden shelves stuffed with boxes and dust to his left, many packed what looked like outdated cleaning utensils.

Across from him sat a man who was well dressed, sharp-eyed and regarding him resignedly; Joe inwardly bristled at the familiar dismissal in his sneer.

"Hello, Mr Brody"

He didn't appear to be of Asian descent, instead he was a rather plain Caucasian.

"Do I know you?" That might have come out a little too sardonic for the man's tastes.

"Evidently not" Yes, he was already confirming a few preconceptions.

His shadowed gaze darted to the broad shoulders and foreboding posture of the man's faceless bodyguard. He knew he was too old to do anything other than respond to the standard openings of 'who are you' and 'what were you doing within the bounds of a restricted area' with the same biting posterity that got his photograph posted on anarchistic websites and his deeds whispered in underground commentaries.

Soon enough however his anticipation got the best of him and he lost what little patience he had.

"…How about we just cut the crap, we both know I'm already too close to ferreting out your dirty little secret so why bother will all of this?" here he gestured about the room and only then noticed the rather conspicuous pane of half-silvered glass that was almost certainly being used to monitor him. "Why not just kill me? It wouldn't be the most extreme thing you've done to keep this under wraps." He made no effort to hide his bitterness or his confidence.

The man's voice remained void of inflection. "I assure you Mr Brody…" and Joe tuned most of it out only to cut in again when the man tried to bring up a placating hand on the mention of the principled nature of his employer's facilities.

Joe made several moderated attempts to steer the conversation towards the purpose of the facility until he lost his patience again and started smacking the edge of the table to emphasize his stringently clipped words.

"Look, I saw the cranes, I saw the cables, I saw the power lines for the plasma turrets! What have you got in there, huh? A weapon? Is this what it's all been about? Is this what my wife died for!" He slouched back into his seat, discontent in the knowledge that there was probably no doubt in their minds now that he was crazy.

"Mr Brody please calm down, we are not a black arms factory or a rogue bioweapons outfit." His tenor was rehearsed but there was still the same impatience behind it. The same dismissal the Japanese police always addressed him with, the same one his prison therapist had used when he finally gave up.

Joe's eyes narrowed dangerously. "Then why all the security, I could hear your 'guards' marching from inside the armoured van you me hauled in on; you've told people it's nothing more than a 'private security force' but it sounds a hell of a lot more like an army to me."

There was a subtle wringing of hands.

"The 'marching' you heard was likely from our substantial work force rather than our security; irregardless, we deal with subjects of a… sensitive nature, Mr Brody, surely you can understand the value organisations like us place on caution in this day and age"

He made sure that his snort sounded as derisive as possible.

For a while they didn't get much further than that, their continuous exchange remained a mutually disinclined back and forth, no ground was given; soon enough, all involved were wondering why this was taking so long.

Then the man switched tactics and started trying informality, and somehow that was the most insulting thing he could possibly do.

"Look, I can't pretend to understand how much your wife's death hurt you…"

"Shut up."

The man paused and sighed almost imperceptibly. Joe scoffed. "…But I can assure you that what happened wasn't your fault, even after all this time we still have no way to accurately predict earthquakes…"

"You did everything right, the Janjira incident was just bad luck, a natural occurrence-"

That was when he realised...

"You have no idea do you…"

Then the lights really started flickering, drawing a twitch out of the man.

"No idea about what?"

The bulb hanging languidly over their heads had been blinking all the way through the interview but now the man was looking noticeably concerned as the winks of interrupting gloom became more frequent and firm.

The guard tried to reassure the man that it was nothing more than a generator malfunction.

"So, what's going on with that, eh?" Ford would probably have cringed at how terribly smug his father sounded then but where was a crazy old man going to get his kicks if not feeding off the fear of twits in suits.

"You're telling me your power cuts out in a pattern?"

When the man suddenly left, with one last cursory look shot his way, he was only slightly concerned, the floor was starting to shake after all, but when the guard put his forefingers up to his ears and scurried out, making certain to lock the door behind him, he started to get worried.

The entire building was angrily shuddering by this point; the ceiling was leaking dust even as the lights turned consternated. Joe's long years living in Japan had desensitized him to earthquakes. It wasn't the reason he was panicking of course.

His eyes darted around the room; frantically searching for a way out, for anything he might have missed.

He had to leave, he had to find Ford, had to warn him, warn everyone.

Not again not again not again.

The door wouldn't budge at first, but as the blackouts became more frequent and the floor began to rumble with the ever-growing tremors, the light of the keypad slowly started to die.

Eventually the door slipped open and he slipped out.

It was cold, wet, windy and crowded. Beyond the platoon of craning, dithering floodlights that were all drawn in a single direction the moonless sky was forebodingly dark, thoroughly chocked with smoggy clouds. Joe pulled the hood of his jacket around his ears and tried to look small as he looked over the rainy asphalt.

There was a squad of trucks neatly lined up nearby what looked like a military hanger. The closer he got the more EDF and PPDC uniforms he was able to spot between the jostling gangs of repairmen and construction workers.

The lights went out again…

Not again not again not again. Get a hold of yourself.

…And he held steady for a moment as sirens suddenly started to blare from the loudspeaker junctions while a voice announced in several languages, something that sounded like 'containment breach'.

For a puzzled moment he thought they were talking about him…

He caught a strange sound looming behind the hiss of the weather: a low, orotund staccato that sounded like an over clocked heartbeat: in a short amount of time it climbed over the encroaching cries and uncomfortably tugged at the insides of his eardrums.

He turned to face the various directions it seemed to be coming from, expecting something ugly to peer back at him, but there was only vague, glowering darkness to answer his eyes. He heard the Jaeger turn on its heel and spied its vast silhouette via a well-placed flash of lightning.

Where the hell was Ford?

The sound continued to grow with the quaking and the blackouts until it was louder than anything else; after every cyclical build up it dropped off, along with the power to what looked like everything.

An electromagnetic pulse… he'd suspected… likely the same one that…

Not again not again not again.

"Dad?" Joe turned to see Ford standing rigid, cautious, looking almost a decade too old. Flanked by a man and a woman who both looked like they'd just been told something terrible.

"…The door was unlocked"

The alien pulsing muted abruptly and left the area in an eerie quiet.

For a moment Ford only looked scornfully at him, then the entire facility started screaming and shaking.

"Oh shit," exclaimed the woman.

The entire world was swallowed up in a grand, warbling scream.


	3. Chapter 3

The Hawaii shatterdome had been offline for about an hour by the time anyone was able to organise a proper response-action.

It came back online within the time it took for the perpetrator to slip out of range of their visuals and into the unnaturally strong darkness that hung over the pacific ocean, something that the paparazzi would undoubtedly one day draw humbling attention to.

Within a PPDC outpost hidden in the short rurals of Maui, Yancy Becket scowled as he imagined a room of elderly politicians insisting that their colleague's charge should have the 'honour' of investigating.

A general distress signal from Honolulu had remained active for less than a minute before it and all outcoming radio traffic was abruptly ceased which preceded the shutdown of every electronic device in the dome.

After a series of bumped knees and data recovery it was discovered that that almost the entire region of Oahu had also fallen under the same inexplicable blackout, even the early warning posts stationed around the city and offshore had failed to report in.

Visual confirmation revealed Honolulu cloaked in midnight, several tall buildings had been removed, replaced with the haunting glow of burning fires and the remnants of a powerful tsunami was battering the coast but otherwise the city was eerily still. Intercepted civilian transmissions were frantic and consternated, full of Polynesian expletives and tearful confessions.

Yancy Becket was called in to the briefing room alongside Raleigh and about four other pilots, all looking expressive and determined, if furtively confused

"What do you think's goin' on?" Asked Raleigh in aside to him.

Yancy could only shrug.

"Officer on deck!"

Marshal Kupuna was a forty seven year old broad-chested grizzly bear of a woman with a spotty chin and a reputation of bending the rules when they clashed with her principles. She charged across the catwalk overlooking engineering and roared over their attentive heads.

"Report! What the hell is going on out there?

The head technician swivelled in his seat to face her direction. "I'm not sure, ma'am, what little data we were able to salvage makes mention of what could possibly be an encroaching Kaiju"

Kupuna threw her hands into the air exasperatedly.

"Fantastic, get me in contact with our intelligence branch, I'd like to personally address whoever fucked up hard enough to miss a fucking breech event!"

The reply was swift and indignant.

"Impossible! We haven't detected a single anomalous signature from the breech in over three weeks"

"Then you've missed something!"

"The portal is under constant visual and radar surveillance, nothing gets past our sensors; whatever this is it's got nothing to do with the kaiju, let the local authorities deal with it!"

That drew up some worried murmurs and plenty of sidelined cussing from the attending personnel.

"What if there's another breech we don't know about?"

"What if they've found a way to sneak through the portal undetected?"

The marshal only had to bark once to get them all tight lipped and stiffly postured. Her eyes, shadowed by the elliptic light of the various on-screen diagrams and battle-sims, ran with old memories until her mind grasped something and scrutinised it.

"Scramble a Jaeger!"

"Ma'am?" the young woman who addressed her quailed when she became the subject of Kupuna's hard gaze.

"I won't risk the lives of my men on presumptions, those people need our help… even in the unlikely event that I'm wrong and it is nothing I'd rather ere on the side of caution"

She moved to dismiss the gathered rangers and later allowed her officers to assign Yancy and Raleigh Becket to take Gypsy Danger to accompany their forces and investigate.

"Ma'am, incoming transmission, high-level priority"

"Oh for f- Let's hear it!"

The screen in front of them, large enough to be a Jaeger visor, blinked into the image of a Japanese man climbing into his golden years, wearing a serious expression.

"Greetings marshal, my name is Ishiro Serizawa and these are my associates" he gestured away to an old man in a grubby radiation suit hunched over a meeting table, a young man in prison garb who was almost certainly a solder of some sort by his stance and a middle aged woman who offered her a lonely smile

"This had better be good"

Serizawa bowed and straightened his tie. "I'll get right to the point: I have been in contact with your superiors and they've directed me to you, we believe we may have some insight as to the nature of your power loss"

"I'm listening"

There was a short pause

"Respectfully, my government feels that this conversation not take place in such an… open format, contact me again when you are certain we will not be overheard"

"There are potentially over a million innocent lives hanging in the balance here and your stalling for privacy?"

"I am truly sorry, but it must be-"

"Fine!" she snapped. "But my rangers are going to hear this as well, they'll be confronting whatever this is head on, they deserve to know"

A gravely voice in the background chuckled roughly. "I like her"

"Dad." A younger voice sounding exasperated

"Mr Brody, please" the woman chided.

She addressed the doubt on his face "You can trust them to keep quiet about whatever this is"

There was a short pause.

"Of course, I'll explain everything when we speak again"

A few minutes later, Yancy couldn't help but grin at Raleigh's boyish gawking when they stepped into the marshal's quarters.

"Whoa!"

"Don't get used to it, kid"

If Yancy didn't value his masculinity quite so much he might have teased Kupuna about the way she discreetly smirked at him like he was her little brother instead. Raleigh had a way of making people fond of him and despite her harshness it wasn't hard to spot that she, at least tacitly, cared for the people under her command, in that 'I'll kick your ass if mess up even once' kind of way.

The primary source of light in the room was a massive computer monitor that swallowed up the entire wall it was on; by contrast the rest of the abode was surprisingly modest, a few functional pieces of worn-out Swedish furniture, a set of stress toys on a poorly furnished table and what looked like a Van Gogh work mounted on the far wall above what might have led to her study. It was oddly relaxed for a military office.

Serizawa's face snapped in front of them again; Yancy took note of how grave the man looked; his wrinkles weren't the only sign of his age, his brow was weary and creased with some long-sat burden but there was also a softness to his eyes, something almost grandfatherly.

"Go ahead"

He cleared his throat. "First of all I need to make sure you understand the context of what I am about to tell you. Do you know of project monarch?"

The Marshall's brow hardened. "Vaguely, a Japanese initiative established in twenty-fourteen after the fourth kaiju incursion with a mandate to study and develop a means of destroying the kaiju without grievous civilian and military expenditure"

At this point the old man from before briskly took a reluctant Serizawa's place: his face was clawed with stress and frustration. Yancy could hear the irritant protests of the other occupants in the room.

"No, actually," he also talked like he was out of a spy movie, "that's just what they wanted you to think. Everything you were told was a cover. The Japanese government wanted to make sure that whatever benefits they could reap from the project would be theirs alone, so they lied, to everyone"

"-Excuse me, I was talking to Mr Serizawa, who are you?" there was no disguising the underlying tone of threat beneath her voice.

"No, look I, hey!" The younger man eventually managed to wrestle him off-screen before a disgruntled looking Serizawa readjusted himself and began again.

"Mr Brody is correct, Monarch's inception took place in nineteen fifty four; the nuclear attacks made on Hiroshima and Nagasaki almost a decade earlier inadvertently awakened something, something ancient and very powerful"

"A Kaiju?"

He nodded gravely. "Of a sort"

"…Oh"

The Marshall fell unsettlingly quiet as the possible implications flittered across her shoulders and, he noticed, through Raleigh's as well.

"Those nuclear tests in the pacific weren't tests at all, once the government truly grasped what they and their decimated military were facing it was all they could think of to try and stop the creature." The woman, who Yancy now learned was English, didn't move from her seat to address the camera and she made no effort to sound anything other than 'matter-of-fact' but she easily made herself heard nonetheless.

As if sensing an unspoken question she continued.

"Japan's post-war necessitousness was actually an advantage when it came to appropriating the records, we were very fortunate to find them again"

"A kaiju, on earth… before the breech?" Kupuna was still processing, Yancy didn't feel like he had the capacity to fully grasp the ramifications of this information but even he knew a globe-shattering revelation when he heard one. Raleigh looked like he could only extrapolate the unease in the atmosphere and translate it into a worried grimace.

Serizawa affirmed her solemnly and Yancy could practically feel the Marshall's face twist into a scowl as the information rattled about in her head.

"Millions of years ago the earth was much more radioactive than it is now, this creature and others like it evolved to feed on that radiation as a food source; when it began to subside, they migrated deep beneath the Earth's surface, closer to the planet's core and lay dormant there for millions of years, until the bombings woke this one up" a visual appeared next to Serizawa's chin of a series of what looked like a band of sharpened mountains stabbing through the waters of the Nihonkai.

"Monarch was established to study these creatures, learn from them"

"Well and good but what does this have to do with Honolulu? Is this… earthborn Kaiju responsible?"

"I can answer that"

This time Serizawa acquiesced the man and stood aside.

He didn't introduce himself but he at least had the decency to look embarrassed as he cleared his throat; while the Marshall only inclined her head Yancy could see the lines forming.

"In nineteen ninety nine the Janjira power plant was destroyed by a larval Kaiju that hatched when it was accidentally uncovered by a mining operation in the Philippines, they were only able to capture it after it had already cocooned beneath the building and killed over two hundred people." The last clause had a personal sting to it.

"Monarch arranged the evacuation of the entire city under the pretence of a meltdown and built a facility on-site to contain and study it"

"I'll assume this cocoon is the point?"

"Mnh. Three days ago it hatched, destroyed the place and flew off."

Serizawa seemed to take that as a cue. He fingered a series of angular holograms and drew up a short clip of a grey, red-eyed, insectoid mass rising out of a fenced arena, a single clawed mandible limb that reminded Yancy of a praying mantis rose up and slammed against the already-straining supports, sending out what looked like an ovular pulse of wind, which signalled an abrupt end to the footage.

"The creature has demonstrated the ability to emit an electromagnetic pulse from its front legs, the EDF has had to track it by the energy signature this power leaves behind. Its sphere of influence was last seen pausing over Honolulu, which is almost certainly the reason for your blackout." Finished Serizawa.

"During its escape the creature destroyed an on-site Jaeger, demonstrated a hide thicker than any recorded breech Kaiju and has recently been proven to possess an almost preternatural ability to hone in on large concentrations of radiation." The woman added.

"So our profile is a several-million-year-old, hyper-lethal, flying, technophile Kaiju with a crippling addiction to radium"

"A rather colourful way of putting it but yes."

A contemplative pause.

"Is it still in Honolulu?"

"Doubtful. The city looks to be showing signs of restored power, which likely means it's moved on."

"I don't suppose there's any point in going after it?"

"Not while it's still on the wing, you need to find out where it's headed and get there first."

"You have some ideas?" She asked almost accusatorily.

Serizawa looked knowing. "The M.U.T.O. will be looking for food, we only need to find the closest concentration of nuclear energy"

"Assuming we can outpace it and retrofit an entire Jaeger with a counter to the E.M.P." Kupuna wasted no time pulling up a map and following the projected path to "Diablo canyon. California. That puts over three thousand people in its way and to the higher ups that's not much"

Serizawa was practically glowing. "Worry not, the EDF has allowed us to borrow command of an anti-Kaiju vessel: the Gotengo; it's a prototype but so far it's proven highly effective in resisting electrical surges; we can buy you some time whilst you travel to the city ahead of us, evacuate the population and prepare for battle"

"I'll make the necessary arrangements" Now the Marshall was back to business "you both know what to do, dismissed!"

"Aye, ma'am!"

"You didn't tell her about Godzilla"

"If all goes as planned we won't have to"

"And if the M.U.T.O. manages to defeat or more likely destroy Gotengo before Godzilla can catch up with it?"

"Then we will simply have to improvise"

"That's not good enough!"

"…I know"


	4. Chapter 4

The Gotengo was a sleek, thickly armoured battleship with a coat as black as the deep ocean. Its angled hindquarters were equipped with propulsion jets powerful enough to lift a Kaiju out of the water and its sloped flanks were armed with a sufficient phaser turrets and missile silos to rival a small country.

The interior of the bridge was short, claustrophobic and marinated in dark, red light, as metallic and detached as its assiduous crew. The captain sat reclined in a large, swivelling chair aft his fellows. He was cool-eyed and bulky, his huge, fat neck bristled with wiry hair, superseded only by an expansive, military moustache.

"Admiral Gyozen! We have visual!"

His iron gaze never faltered. "Has the target altered course?"

"Negative, sir!"

His deep voice was composed and confident. "Lock on and engage!"

The room was filled with a chorus of 'Aye sir's shortly before the nose of the vessel began to whirr and glow.

The afternoon sky was saturated by a cutting beam of harlequin light that stabbed out through the crisp air like a medieval javelin, straight into the unsuspecting monster's side.

The resounding shriek could be heard even through the enforced hull.

"Target is moving on an intercept course, trying to flank us!"

"Fire side batteries!"

The Muto's airspace was immediately engulfed with a barrage of melodramatic explosions; its flight path wavered when a few of the Gotengo's missiles struck home against one of its outstretched wings.

Gyozen took the opportunity. "Evasive action! Focus fire!" A hard bank had him bracing himself on the arms of his chair.

The Muto made a wincing turn that would have sheared Gotengo in half, matching the ship's desperate motions stride for stride; cutting into their intended route with a mighty pull of its wings the monster charged Gotengo over a gust of whistling wind.

Gyozen's subsequent grin was manic. "Engage drill, get me ramming speed!"

"Sir!"

The two bulks converged on each other with a cloud-parting clap; the Gotengo's speed gave it an initial advantage as the colossal momentum drove a violent perforation into the Muto's discoloured abdomen.

The claws of the Muto lunged out and found purchase on Gotengo's hull, both parties tore chunks out of each other. The world began to spin.

"Severe hull damage, sir, we're losing altitude!"

The mass of wings and metal groaned in an incensed choir as it was gracelessly dragged down out of the sky.

"Disengage, disengage! Brace for impact, all hands brace for impact!"

The hard smack of the pacific surf was enough to separate the two combatants and send the men lurching in their seats: Gotengo was amphibious but the damage was enough to significantly hamper her crew's efforts to recover, the Muto on the other hand evidently wasn't naturally aquatic: it's limbs flailed and squawked, stirring up waves large enough to capsize battleships on top of the after affects of the foamy crater their impact had punched into the ocean.

Gyozen pushed down his discomfort, Gotengo's fate was in the hands of his men now.

He placed a sweaty paw on the console to his right "This is Gotengo on a private channel to EDF HQ, what's Godzilla's ETA? Over!"

"Minutes! You've got to kill that thing, admiral! Now!"

Gyozen cursed. "Status!"

"Engines are back online, sir! However, we can't guarantee full power"

Gotengo strained to escape the water, which bubbled and churned into steam under the flare of the port and starboard stabilisers. The Muto was fortunately having similar trouble: great rivulets of pale foam ran down the iridescent colours of its flexing wings; with an almighty heave it pushed itself up from the water and struggled into the air, followed closely by Gotengo, picking up speed and height.

The sky was set alight once again as Gotengo brought its full might to bear on the disoriented Kaiju. The Muto was smothered in explosions, bullets designed to tear through nuke resistant flesh carved whizzing pathways into the angry, black smoke.

The Muto however, taking advantage of the relative obscurity the heat of the explosions inadvertently provided, had now achieved a superior height to Gotengo and, in a move that demonstrated just how far-gone the engines truly were, it allowed itself to drop down through the fire and smoke onto the hulk of the ship, looking for all the world like a demon spawned loose from Naraka: a mass of fat, silver wings and claws that fell upon and grappled with Gotengo like a giant squid might a sperm whale.

Gotengo groaned under the immense weight as it was forced back down, the Muto's scissor jaws drew back and opened wide to reveal a cavernous turtle-like maw, filled with long, alien blades of teeth that ripped a screech out of the side of the ship.

"Hull breech! Reactor's flaring!"

The chittering sounded far too much like laughter as it drew back a huge limb and scythed it across their bow, the end of its claw catching on the wing.

A new voice shouted over the commlink, the man's Japanese had an American twang to it.

"Gotengo, come in! This is Gypsy Danger, can you maintain altitude?"

Gyozen did his best to be heard over the destruction of his prided vessel. "We have the situation under control!"

But one of his crew betrayed him. "Negative, Gypsy, we're going down!"

Throughout the chaos the Gotengo's cannons lined up against the monster's taught belly and punched every ounce of remaining firepower into it.

"Gotengo, break off, you've done your job now let us do ours!"

Gyozen cursed long and hard, there was no way to hide the fact that they were losing the fight.

"The Muto has a hold on the ship, we can't escape! Thrusters and weapons are at minimal capacity and if I'm not mistaken we've just been gutted hard enough to agitate our power core!"

"Eject! You've done enough! The evacuation is almost complete!"

There was a pause long enough to hold a few lines of overshadowed prayer before…

"ABANDON SHIP! ABANDON SHIP!"

The mass of ship and beast plunged, like a comet shrouded in smoke, back into the ocean.

Gyozen's last conscious thought before the entire room collapsed into a foamy, snaggletoothed maw was that he'd failed.

The Muto had escaped him.

Godzilla was coming.

.,.,.,.,.

Gypsy Danger stood grand and impassive in the surf before Avila beach, a bulk of shipping crates and makeshift housing squatting quietly at the Jaeger's back.

The radio had been silent for approximately three minutes post Gotengo's presumed destruction, though it felt like much longer.

"Do you think they made it?" Raleigh's voice was tentative, a far cry from his characteristic boisterousness. Yancy's stoic posture did nothing to betray his own unease; he'd always been the pessimist between the two of them.

"I don't know." Part of him wanted to believe that the Japanese had had a plan B for this sort of thing but if that were the case then why wouldn't they at least have the decency to let people know they'd survived.

"I think they made it." For brief a moment Yancy Becket caught the image of a small boy standing defiantly before the howling storm, refusing to surrender his hope.

"Just be ready, the reinforcements are holding but they were made last minute, we can't know how long they might hold up, which means we have to finish this quickly."

"Yeah, I hear ya."

"Gypsy: status!" barked a sharp voice.

"No sighting, what do the readouts say?"

"The Kaiju's electromagnetic dark zone is about to make it very hard for us to talk to you."

"I'm lonely already," quipped Raleigh.

"How long have we got?"

"Five minutes, give or take, I only have a rough approximation of its airspeed."

"All systems green!" announced Yancy.

"Don't worry, we're ready for this guy!" proclaimed Raleigh.

Five minutes passed and the system caught sight of the Muto gliding amiably over the horizon, the brothers watched silently as multifarious graphs and texts swept over the creature's sunburnt silhouette and drew away estimates of size and muscle strength.

Gypsy Danger raised a pair of fists and sounded a challenging horn.

The Muto answered as its claws stabbed into the shallow ocean and stood hauntingly strong with the fast-fading sunlight at its back.

.,.,.,.,.

"Marshall, we've been picking up some anomalous readings I think you might want to take a look!"

The Marshall took care not to spill her coffee as she manoeuvred her way past a large, black swivel chair to scowl worrisomely down at the monitoring equipment.

Along the latitude of the viewing screen, a weedy LOCCENT technician half-pointed to a fat, ovular blob of heat and numbers climbing towards the amorphous mass of readings that was most certainly now the Muto and gypsy danger battling across the coast.

"What are we looking at here exactly?"

"I can't get any specifics; before the Gotengo engaged, the Muto picked up speed and the dark spot moved away from something we wouldn't have picked up otherwise."

The image enhanced on a series of small intravenous blobs cut into semicircles by the periodic lines of the Muto's dark zone.

"What is it?"

"We can't be exactly sure ma'am but if any of our projections are to be believed it's massive, bigger than any Jaeger or Kaiju on record."

"And this thing is following the Muto?"

"It very much looks that way, ma'am."

There was a very angry pause.

"Get Serizawa back on the line, he's got some fucking explaining to do!"

.,.,.,.,.

"I told you it wouldn't work!" The old man, who she had recently been underwhemled to learn, was named Joe.

Kupuna strafed the breadth of her office like a vigilant kestrel, her eyes downcast, burning holes into the floor.

"I guess this is what I get for being trusting"

"Marshall…" The good director tried to interject.

"Shut up!"

He failed.

"This latest Kaiju might just be the greatest threat the world has ever seen, we've already lost a prime battleship and thousands of innocent lives and now you're telling me something worse is following in its wake?"

"Yes but…"

"I can't abide your organisation's backwards mandate of secrecy, if you'd allowed us to intervene we might have destroyed both of these creatures before they became a threat!"

"I don't think…!"

"No, you didn't think and now, thanks to your short sightedness, we have two incredibly dangerous Kaiju about to steamroll their way through the states."

"Marshall, please!" His plea wasn't hostile but it was nonetheless forceful and sharp; for a moment she considered chewing him out but thought better of it, she wasn't ready to completely burn bridges just yet.

"It's been three years since Gojira last appeared and over sixty since he attacked a human settlement."

The pause this time was contemplative but no less tense.

"…Maybe you should start at the beginning."

.,.,.,.,.

The Muto almost seemed surprised when Gypsy Danger leapt off a nearby cliff like a parkour artist off a park bench and snatched it out of the sky.

But when they collided with the coastline and turned the shallow waters deep it was Gypsy who was scrambling to keep a frantic claw from gouging out her visor.

The pilots might have made a joke about how ridiculous they looked if they weren't still apprehensive about testing this unknown Kaiju's strength.

The gyrations of the cockpit's gravitational appropriation mechanisms quickly worked to accommodate for each strike and especially when the Muto exhibited a surprising amount of strength for a wounded creature when it violently threw Gypsy Danger out of the full nelson hold she'd managed to snare it in.

Powerful rockets stabilised the Jaeger as her enormous boots stirred up waves enormous enough to flood the lower parts of the nearby town.

"I think this asshole's had enough already, he's trying to bail out on us!"

"This isn't a fucking cage match, Raleigh!"

"I swear you are no fun anymore!"

"Raleigh!"

"Ugh, fine! Plasma cannon!"

The Muto screeched as a bolt of white-blue light lanced into the dry, flaking remnants of its ruined belly before it flattened the better part of an extensive refugee shanty.

Before it could completely regain its footing Gypsy sprinted gallantly before sending a rocket propelled football kick straight into the Muto's jaw: there was a satisfying whip-like cracking sound that resonated around the battlefield as well as the monster's keen grunt that proceeded it tumbling up the hill and then scrambling as it spread its wings once again, braying as if frightened.

"Alright one more shot should keep it down for good, you seeing that tear in its wing?"

"You know I am."

This time the Muto flattened a hill before it rose to its feet and turned to them, dragging its ruined wing along the ground, it bellowed at them, looking very much like an alien out of the horror movies that used to scare twelve-year-old Raleigh, (and secretly Yancy too).

They became genuinely nervous however when it rose its foreleg and stamped it against the hill sending out the aforementioned electromagnetic pulse.

Gypsy barely braced in time and groaned as her body whined and sparked, blowing out industrial fuses to prevent a major system from giving way.

"We've lost power to all our weapon's systems, engines have been reduced to thirty percent capacity, we couldn't even hop if we wanted to!"

"It's trying to run way again!"

"It's headed for the power plant!"

.,.,.,.,.,

"You're saying this… 'Godzilla' is some kind of great equaliser?"

"In a sense." Assented Vivienne.

Serizawa almost looked morose as he continued. "Marshall my organisation has spent the greater allocation of our budget silencing palaeontologists, geologists and so many others who have tried to announce the existence of Kaiju before the world is ready: deep in the dark coils of the planet there are fossils, some buried so deep that most of their bones have been washed away into the liquid layer of Earth's outer core, the implications of many of them are… more than unsettling: incidentally, we've not so recently discovered that the Circum Seismic Belt, previously thought of as a ring of naturally formed volcanoes, is actually the remnant of a war that was waged long before reptiles had even taken their first steps."

Serizawa let the information sink in.

"…Go on. A 'war' you say?"

His shoulders slumped as though shouldering some familiar weight

"Indeed, this was before my appointment as head of Terrestrial Kaiju Research but our information says that the various teams assigned to study this phenomena were ordered to find the remains of this so called 'war,' in the form of either the soldiers or their weapons: we found both."

.,.,.,.,.,

"We've got to keep it away from the plant! The techs said this thing feeds on nuclear energy, he might get a boost enough to get away" Yelled Yancy.

"Or kick our ass. Divert all nonessential-!"

"We've lost all nonessential power"

"Then let's leg it!"

"Raleigh, we can't take another EMP, the modifications were designed to survive the dark zone itself not a precise application!"

"What choice do we have?!"

Gypsy could only amble.

"Augh, fuck!"

The sea started to rumble at their backs.

Then it started to growl.

"Hey… do you hear that?"

,.,.,.,.,

Kupuna was getting a distinct sinking feeling that she was about to be dragged into something well above her depth, though she didn't show it in her unnervingly stable tone.

"Dr Serizawa, in our talk so far you mentioned that Mr Brody's readings revealed that the Muto was calling to something… what was it calling to?"

"We believe it to be another of its kind"

"I just got word of a Kaiju that stormed its way out of the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository… it's a cat 4 and boasts a similar description to our friend out there."

The quiet was as still and cold as a silent funeral.

This time Graham answered and she answered coldly.

"From what we can tell barely three percent of the ancient Kaiju survived the war, ninety percent of those remaining are either dead or the last of their kind, the logical conclusion is that we are looking at the remaining zero point three percent, and their exhumation has awakened Godzilla"

"We believe that in the past Gojira fulfilled the role of an apex predator, an agent of balance, keeping any one species from growing too numerous."

"Marshall nature has an order, a power to restore balance, I believe he is that power"

Graham had her head in her hands now "We assumed the female's spore was dormant, but I suppose a great many things were assumed that have not held true."

There was another cutting silence before anyone dared to speak.

"So does anyone else have a plan besides me?"

All ears turned to Joe Brody.

.,.,.,.,

"Sir, there's been a beech event"

"That's not possible! Vegas is under attack by the unidentified Kaiju as we speak! I thought you told me these things only come out one at a time Herman"

"They do!"

"Sir, I don't think this is the sort of Kaiju we're used to dealing with"

"Do tell, Newt."

.,.,.,.,

"So apparently Gypsy Danger is otherwise occupied so they sent in Brawler Yukon to take care of the breech."

"What are they calling this guy?"

"Knifehead"


End file.
